


Survival

by AnselaJonla



Series: HFY [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:42:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22235041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnselaJonla/pseuds/AnselaJonla
Summary: A story written for the Humanity Fuck Yeah subreddit (r/HFY).Many races have tried to colonise the planet designated XH558-SOGB. Only one has succeeded.
Series: HFY [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600498
Kudos: 9





	Survival

**Author's Note:**

> This is just something I smashed out in an hour while watching "fly on the wall" medical docus on More4 of a Sunday night. It's not been beta-read, I wanted to get it out before I changed my mind.

Many races have attempted to colonise the planet officially designated XH558-SOGB, but only one has succeeded.

The first attempt was made by the Dirni. To them, as to their successors, XH558 looked like a perfect garden planet. It has an atmosphere breathable to the majority of starfaring species, drinkable water, and fertile soil. There are verdant forests, lush grasslands, soaring mountains, and rolling hills, with abundant fauna in all habitats. An absolutely brilliant find.

The Dirni wasted no time in claiming XH558 as their own. They landed colonists almost immediately, after doing the bare minimum to ensure it was habitable. And, initially, the newly minted Eamleu1 was aptly named, and the twenty-five thousand strong group of initial colonists thrived there. For ten years it grew, with fierce competition for each and every one of the thousand resident permits that were granted each month.

Then one day contact was lost with Eamleu, in the height of summer. No warnings were sent, nor any calls for help. When the next group of colonists arrived, their ship was accompanied by a Dirni Imperial Navy recon vessel, which preceded them in-system from the warp point.

The colony was gone. Burnt to ashes with no survivors. XH558’s orbit was, as it turned out, rather irregular, and some years brought it closer to the system’s star than others. Those years were characterised by drought, dry lightning storms, and high winds. A recipe, it was surmised, for catastrophic fires, one of which consumed the fledgling colony in its entirety. Not a single survivor was ever found.

The Dirni sold their claim to XH558. Their beliefs did not permit them to make a second attempt at a colony where so many had died. The Raza were the ones to purchase the rights to settle on XH558. They studied the Dirni’s own reports carefully, and thought they could see where the semi-arboreal species had gone wrong.

The Raza made their home in the foothills of a large mountain range. Ytomn2 was larger than Eamleu from the beginning, with the fifty thousand initial colonists joined by another five thousand a month. To reduce the risk of burning, all trees within ten kilometres of Ytomn were felled, and used in the construction of the colony.

Ytomn did not burn. Not while it was occupied, anyway. A planet that sometimes swings too close to its sun can also orbit slightly too far away. A colony that had grown used to mild winters was not prepared for a longer, harsher one that normal.

The summer had been cooler than normal, and the harvest was looking to be sparse due to the poor growing weather. There _would_ be a harvest though, and they’d planted excess to store for later years, so the short crop shouldn’t have been a problem.

Then the frost arrived. The residents of Ytomn woke up to find the world blanketed in white frost. Everything glittered in the weak sunlight: houses, shops, pavements… and half-grown crops in the fields. Plants meant to grow in summer had been frozen to the roots. The harvest never happened.

The Raza are a fully herbivorous species. They had no food beasts that they could fall back on for the winter. Without that vital summer crop, they didn’t have enough food to survive a winter that had arrived more than a month early. They tried to make it work, rationing the food stored from the previous year, bolstered by shipments from other Raza worlds, but it wasn’t enough. XH558 was abandoned, the starving Raza colonists unwilling to wait for the end of winter on increasingly short rations.

The rights passed from species to species. Some burned like the Dirni, others starved like the Raza. No one is quite sure what happened to the colony sent by the secretive aquatic Lorca, but it failed like all before it.

Eventually the rights were bought by a Terran trade conglomerate. Bought is probably the wrong word, in all honesty. It was included as a minor part of a trade deal, which the other species probably thought they’d got the better end of.

It was initially thought that the Terrans weren’t going to do anything with XH558. The last score of owners hadn’t bothered, after all, and had just looked for a way to palm the system off on another sucker as quickly as possibly.

It turned out that they were just biding their time. They initially landed during a distant orbit, at the end of a long winter. They landed in the hills between some grasslands and a mountain range.

Terrans chose to live both above and below the surface of the planet. Many residents have dwellings in both parts of the colony. Fields expanded into the grassland, home to crops and livestock to feed the ever expanding human colony.

The galaxy watched as XH558 wobbled into a close pass, into fire season. Crops began to fail in the drought. Fires sprung up.

And the Terrans retreated. No, not off the planet. They retreated underground. They abandoned their crops, their pastures, their surface homes. Sharp whistles cut through the air, directing trained companion animals to drive the livestock into the giant entrances cut into the sides of the hills, predators manipulating the instincts of prey to ensure their safety. Once every Terran and animal was inside, all entrances to the underground colony were sealed.

Once the fires passed they re-emerged. They picked up their surface lives again. Fields were resown, pastures refenced, and houses rebuilt. And so the colony had survived one of XH558’s two main catastrophes, a feat that only a few had managed before.

Years passed in a middling orbit, far enough to avoid the wildfires but not far enough to trigger a killer winter. Eventually the projections showed that her orbit was going to be a far one, and the galaxy held its breath. Surely the Terrans wouldn’t be able to survive _both_ extremes.

Terran farmers had read the signs as well, and didn’t bother planting crops that year. The fields all lay fallow. Livestock scraped at the sparse grass, watched by ranchers and herders that shivered inside clothing that they refused to admit was inadequate.

They’d anticipated the harsh winter though. Every year saw more food stored. Grains were stored in giant silos, fruits and vegetables were pickled, frozen, and turned into jams and preserves, and meats were smoked or frozen. There was, according to some estimates, enough food to last the colony for more than a year without shortening their rations. And that was without slaughtering any of the livestock for fresh meat, which they continued to do throughout the winter.

To the amazement of all the other spacefaring species, the humans actually survived the long winter. And to prove it wasn’t a fluke they continued to survive and thrive, spreading out across the surface, and sub-surface, of XH558.

Or, as they call it, Vulcan.

1) A Dirni word roughly equivalent to “Paradise”  
2) A Raza word meaning “Home”


End file.
